A former federal highway commissioner says Americans would pay several cents a gallon more in federal fuel taxes if road and transit projects were finished much more efficiently.

Thomas V. Bona

A former federal highway commissioner says Americans would pay several cents a gallon more in federal fuel taxes if road and transit projects were finished much more efficiently.

That means fewer earmarks, projects that don’t stop at state lines and work getting done in less than 10 years.

Tom Skancke, who served on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission for more than three years, said the interstate system wasn’t designed for today’s demand and hasn’t been updated properly.

The key is to raise the fuel tax and streamline the way projects are chosen and delivered, Skancke told a group of regional leaders at a transportation summit.

“We need to be willing to pay for this if Congress gets it right. ... We have to do for our children what our parents and grandparents did for us,” Skancke said. “If we get involved in the process, we can get it done.”

More than 300 leaders from northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa were in Dubuque this week for the second annual Tri-State Alliance transportation summit. The focus of the meeting is how the three-state region can position itself to win key road and rail projects with the limited transportation funding available.

Skancke was on the 12-member committee from 2005 through 2008, and since has advocated for the commission’s recommendations around the country.

The interstate highway system was designed more than 50 years ago to mobilize the military and move people during a national emergency, not to accommodate the millions of trucks and commuters who use it today, Skancke said.

There’s been a lack of vision in the decades since, he said, with federal programs getting bloated with pet projects.

Federal fuel taxes, 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel, haven’t been raised since 1997, and in inflation-adjusted dollars, not since the early 1980s.

Just to get the federal road and transit system up to “a state of good repair,” the government would have to spend three times its current level for 50 years, Skancke said.

His commission recommended raising the federal fuel taxes by five to 10 cents a gallon to reach that level. But to get Americans on board, he said the federal transportation spending process had to be “performance driven and outcome based.”

It needs to focus on the most important projects that cause a visible return on investment with shorter drive times and cheaper delivery of goods, he said. It also needs to focus on a national vision, not congressionally chosen earmarks.

“We have set our transportation program up to fail Americans because we have states competing against states and cities competing against states and this was not what the program was set up to do,” Skancke said. “I-80 does not stop between Nevada and Utah. It carries all over the country. ... That’s why they call it the Interstate Highway System, not the interstate highway pieces.”

Thomas V. Bona can be reached at (815) 987-1343 or tbona@rrstar.com.

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